THERE AREN’T JUST TWO AMERICAS — THERE ARE ALSO TWO BRITAINS:

Public sector employees work nine years less than their private sector counterparts but are paid 30 per cent more, a bombshell report reveals today.

Extraordinary research tells a tale of two Britains – a state sector awash with taxpayers’ cash while the rest of the economy struggles to stay afloat.

Public sector workers enjoy better pay than those in the private sector, as well as better pensions, shorter hours, and earlier retirement. Over their lifetimes, those in the private sector work 23 per cent longer – equivalent to an extra nine years and ten weeks – than public sector employees. This is thanks to a combination of shorter hours, more time off and earlier retirement.

The findings explode once and for all the old idea that public sector workers have better job security and gold-plated pensions because they have lower salaries. They will be seized on by the Coalition Government, which has warned that the bloated state sector has been artificially insulated from the recession and is in line for massive spending cuts.

The report, by centre-Right think tank Policy Exchange, also found that the chance of being made compulsorily redundant in the civil service is an astonishing 0.00007 per cent.

This may become a source of tension in a lot of countries.

UPDATE: Reader Adam Sullivan writes:

You may want to link the Amazon DVD set for “Yes, Minister” which is a great, classic British comedy.

Aside from simply being funny, the series does a great job of deconstructing how career government workers rig the system to create benefit streams to themselves while coming up with cynically absurd rationalizations to sell the public. Sadly, we are told these same reasons today. And the politicians who enter the scene to reform the system quickly get co-opted, manipulated, duped or simply undermined by the ruling class of cynical, smart, and elite bureaucrats.

Highly recommended and completely relevant to today’s global political situation of government run for the governing class.

You could never get Hollywood to produce something like that for America, could you?